#oliver postgate

[dduane]

A different Noggin

After @petermorwood and I got married, we started the process of many long discussions about what kinds of media we'd each grown up with that the other one had never seen or heard of before.

During this process I discovered to my astonishment that a limited-animation series of which I had only the vaguest memory was actually a real thing. (Which was reassuring, as for some years I'd half believed that I'd dreamed or hallucinated it.)

It turns out that WNET in New York—my home PBS TV station—had for a short time in the early 1960s carried episodes of a charming British animated series the name of which I'd long forgotten. But when I described a memory of "mournful clarinet* music" and mentioned the first few lines of the only episode I thought I remembered—"In the land of the North, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold seas—" Peter immediately laughed and said, "Noggin the Nog!"

And of course that's what it was: one of numerous BBC animated series devised by the amazing writer/animator Oliver Postgate and his collaborator, puppeteer and artist Peter Firmin—later jointly responsible for classics like Bagpuss and The Clangers.

Noggin (for those of you who haven't met him yet) starts out as the Prince of the Nogs, the northern people over whom he eventually becomes King, despite the continual machinations of his evil uncle Nogbad the Bad. It's all extraordinarily good-natured and gentle stuff, witty and inventive, with Noggin's intelligence and kindness repeatedly saving him and his friends from trouble. You can see the first episode of the series here.

What brings the subject up right now, though, is that this morning I mentioned Noggin to Peter and said "I wonder how much Noggin they've got on YouTube?" Peter went looking... and then found something astonishing: an episode of Noggin that someone had fandubbed into Old English. Here it is. (Do turn the captions on: they've subtitled this episode in OE.)

...Meanwhile, if you're already familiar with this series, you may like to hear that The Sagas of Noggin the Nog is available on DVD from the Dragons' Friendly Society.

*Actually oboe, I think.

[mametzwood]

Bagpuss, oh, Bagpuss

Oh, fat, furry cat puss,

Wake up and look at the thing that I bring

Wake up, be bright, be golden and light.

Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing

[downthetubes]

Celebrations begin early for the 50th anniversary of Bagpuss with new high definition Blu-ray and DVD release this week

Ahead of his 50th anniversary next year, this week sees the release of the hugely popular Bagpuss animated series in high definition - and there are other celebratory happenings, too

[dowsingfordivinity]

Oliver Postgate autobiography

Currently reading Seeing Things by Oliver Postgate. The most gripping autobiography I have ever read. It’s my second time reading it and I’d forgotten how gripping it is. (more…) “”

[6monthsofwinter]

Oliver Postgate musta been on some whack ass shrooms when he wrote the Bagpuss episode about the small soft Hamish.

If you don't know, Bagpuss is a kids' show from the 70s (?) about a toy cat and his chums who keep finding Objects and being like "tf is this brah" and Bagpuss is like "this is the foolish fluffy fiddlestick from Finland you flibbertigibbets" and then tells them all about the foolish fluffy fiddlestick from Finland. And then the woodpecker (chum #1) goes like nyehhh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nonsense (direct quote btw) and the rag doll and frögge (chums #2 and #3) are like ACKSHUALLY it's a fly swatter but nice try bozo. And then they sing a song. There are some mice sometimes too :3

ANYWAY one episode starts with them finding a weird tartan rat thing (fig. A) and they're like "🤔" and then Bagpuss gets his Thinking Cap and clocks that it's a "small soft Hamish" and tells the story of Tavish McTavish, a Scottish fella who lived in the mountains because every other human being fucking hated him cause he was bad at playing the bagpipes. And then one day he hears someone else being really shit at bagging the pipes and he's like "Crikey!!! It must be my long-lost brother Hamish McTavish!" And then it walks up and it's actually this weird tartan creature??? And it's small and soft and he dubs it the Hamish (Fig. B) because its call sounds like his brother playing the bagpipes. And by the way it also has a long-lost brother. And then it fucks off cause its family show up and Tavish is all alonesome :( so he moves BACK down the mountain to civilisation and just never plays the bagpipes again. Cause everyone hates it. And he never finds his brother ever again, too bad so sad, the end.

But not really the end cause then the woodpecker goes like "Bagpuss you dopey twat it's a porcupine just without any spines" and Bagpuss goes like "bull fucking shit there ain't no thing" and the frögge and the rag doll sing a song to try motivate the porcupine to grow some spines? But the song is about a porcupine "sailing" a hot air balloon around the world and then its spines pop the balloon and it falls? And they realise at the end that that was a fairly fucking stupid choice of song to motivate it to grow MORE spines and anyway guys false alarm it's actually just a pincushion. So then the mice chant while dancing in circles and ritualistically stabbing it with dozens of pins like it's Julius fucking Caesar (Fig. C) and THEN the episode ends. Fucking WILD.

But seriously you should watch Bagpuss it's so good

Fig. A: The porcupine pre-ritualistic murder

Fig. B: The small soft Hamish engages in intimate relations with Tavish McTavish

Fig. C: The mice dance around the perforated corpse of the porcupine

[earhartsease]

find you someone who says "soup" the way Oliver Postgate did

[bunnziebobcat]

Fan Art Friday - Duke Phillips meets Bagpuss

This week's #FanArtFriday features Duke Phillips from Al Jean and Mike Reiss' The Critic (Gracie Films/CPT) meets Bagpuss (Smallfilms/BBC), who turned fifty this year, and they're celebrating the heavenly birthdays of Duke's voice artist, Charles Napier, and Bagpuss' co-creator, Oliver Postgate, respectively.

[seriousbrat]

Serious question: what do you think Lily’s favorite movie was?

Okay I've been thinking about this question! It's somewhat difficult because I don't think she would have been going to see a lot of movies later in the 70s, not once she's in the Order- though maybe she might have taken James at some point just so he could see what it was like.

Unfortunately (because I hate w*ody Allen) i kind of think she might have liked Annie Hall (1977), had she seen it. But I think my answer might be Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). I can see her taking James to Life of Brian as well. Maybe she liked something weird like Harold and Maude (1971) but she was a bit young when it was released, or something alt and punky like Jubilee (1978)

There were probably films from the 60s she saw on television (back then it apparently took like... a decade for films to appear on TV after being released in cinemas) like Georgy Girl (1966) and A Taste of Honey (1961). I see her liking films about plucky young heroines haha. Also I think she would have pretended not to like things like Grease because Petunia did lol, but secretly enjoyed them.

And I know you didn't ask about TV but she likely would have been watching more TV than movies since it was more accessible/constantly available, things like Coronation Street, Fawlty Towers and ofc Doctor Who. She probably grew up with Oliver Postgate series (they're beautiful, highly recommend) like The Clangers and Pogles' Wood, as well as Blue Peter and the Basil Brush Show lol (he's a fox, not a squirrel!)

Sorry that got so long!!

[airpodpros]

bagpuss! a british tv show, first aired in 1974 on the 12th of february; the show was made through stop motion animation by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin and only aired 13 episodes but remained extremely popular being voted all-time favorite children’s program in 1999.

[anothermanoutoftime]

Tagged by @master-gatherer earlier today (yaay!)

Get to know me better meme:

Last song listened to: Everybody Wants To Be A Cat (Gypsy Dynamite)

Https://on.soundcloud.com/nkzMQ

Currently reading: False Value by Ben Aaronovitch and A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab

Currently watching: Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films (it's literally on BBC Four now)

I'm supposed to tag 9 people (9!), so (if it's your bag) here goes:

@inpraiseofpmg @outlawpetegsc @clatterbane @beggerprince72 @cogwurx

@thehandthatfeedsme @plurdledgabbleblotchits

Well, 7...

[dduane]

Time for some Bagpuss.

(See also Charlie Brooker's heartfelt obit for Oliver Postgate, the creator and narrator of Bagpuss and much other classic British children's TV.)

(BTW, for a contrast in tone: how Charlie Brooker normally sounds/sounded.)

[nostalgiapage]

The Clangers by Oliver Postgate (1969)

https://youtu.be/l5gGNtMBFVA?si=CAuGZ8gbtKlO4FfR

[thinkbolt]

The Pingwings episode 2 "The Ice Cream Tree" (Small Films, 1961) - dir. Oliver Postgate

[downthetubes]

WebFind: The Clangers Script Book deep discounted by Postscript Books

Devon-based independent bookseller Postscript Books are currently offering copies of Clangers - The Complete Scripts 1969–1974 by Daniel and Oliver Postgate at substantial discount

[justforbooks]

Although she was born in London, and retained a classic English poise all her life, Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, was a Hollywood and Broadway star for more than seven decades, and one who was completely unclassifiable. On her film debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win one. She graduated to play Laurence Harvey’s evil, possibly incestuous, mother – although she was only three years older than Harvey – in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and then a dotty amateur witch in Disney’s follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).

This versatility, allied to her natural grace, vitality and chastely appealing features – her eyes were full, blue and unblinking, her face almost perfectly round, her mouth a cupid’s bow from the studio era – propelled her to stage stardom in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966) and, in London at the Piccadilly theatre in 1973, as the show-stopping Mama Rose in Gypsy, by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.

Lansbury had been initially reluctant to assume Ethel Merman’s mantle in Gypsy but, like Merman, she gave the performance of her life, full of steel and tenderness in equal measure. Her performance was more nuanced and needy than Merman’s; the critic Robert Cushman described “a slow steady build towards magnificence”.

But she became best known worldwide for Murder, She Wrote, an American television series running from 1984 to 1996, with four subsequent TV films. She played the incisive and level-headed Jessica Fletcher, a retired English teacher, mystery writer and amateur sleuth in the coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine, a sleepy location with a criminal body count as delightfully high and unlikely as in Midsomer Murders.

“It really was a fluke success,” Lansbury said, “and came at a time when that kind of family entertainment seemed needed.” She added that, of all the characters she played, Fletcher was the one most like herself: intuitive and sensitive, a voice of calm and reason in a troubled time. She gradually assumed ownership of the CBS series. Peter Shaw, whom she had married in 1949, was joint director of the production company; her son, Anthony, and stepson, David, were executive producers, her brother Bruce was supervising producer.

Family was always of paramount importance to Lansbury. She came from strong, muscular stock: her father, Edgar Lansbury, was a lumber merchant and one-time member of the Communist party and mayor of Poplar (his father was George Lansbury, a reforming leader of the Labour party); her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an Irish actor who took Angela to the Old Vic theatre in London from an early age. One of her cousins was Oliver Postgate, the British animator best known for Bagpuss.

She was educated at South Hampstead high school for girls and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Her father died in 1934, and her mother merged her family – Angela and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce – with that of a former British Army colonel in India, Lecki Forbes, under one roof in Hampstead.

It was not a happy arrangement.

At the outbreak of war, Moyna decamped with her children to New York, and Angela continued her training for two more years at the Feagin school. While her mother toured Canada in a variety show for the troops, Angela did cabaret turns in Montreal. When Moyna’s agent sent her to Hollywood for an audition, she decided to move the children out there with her.

Nothing much happened at first, so mother and daughter took jobs as sales clerks at Bullocks Wilshire, the art deco department store in Los Angeles, while continuing to audition. Angela was still only 17 when she landed the role in Gaslight, and this set a pattern of playing older than her age. A notable exception was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which she played Sibyl Vane, the chirpy music-hall singer, a role that brought her second Oscar nomination; through her co-star, Hurd Hatfield, she met her future husband, Shaw. She had been married previously, for just nine months, to the actor Richard Cromwell, who was almost twice her age.

By this point a Hollywood fixture, Lansbury played Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in National Velvet (1944), sang Jerome Kern’s How’d You Like to Spoon With Me? in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), fooled with Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955), peaked in glory in The Manchurian Candidate, with her third and final Oscar nomination, and joined another great cast list in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), which David Lean took over as director from George Stevens.

Lansbury took American citizenship in 1951, and made her Broadway debut opposite Bert Lahr in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso in 1957, following with Helen in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in 1960 and, most significantly, Cora Hooper Hoover, the corrupt mayor in Sondheim and Laurents’s 1964 flop Anyone Can Whistle. The show, which has since become a concert favourite, closed in a week, but Lansbury came out of it with flying colours, commended by critics for her agility and engaging personality; she was even likened to a young Bette Davis.

This led to her Mame acclaim, and her first Tony award. Lansbury played Auntie Mame, a free-spirited woman who picks herself off the floor of the stock market crash to sing Bosom Buddies (Lansbury duetted with Bea Arthur) and who ultimately recoups her fortunes by marrying a southern aristocrat. She won a second Tony in Herman’s next show, Dear World (1969), a musical based on Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, in which she appeared to be dressed in “a wedding cake made of cobwebs”, according to the critic Walter Kerr.

A belated London debut followed in 1972, when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in Edward Albee’s All Over, playing the mistress of a dying man, locked in battle with Peggy Ashcroft as his wife. She took Gypsy back to Broadway in 1974 for a few months, winning her third Tony, then joined the National theatre at the Old Vic in 1975 to play a fairly youthful, glamorous Gertrude to Albert Finney’s thickset, plainspoken and powerful Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall; the production was part of the opening season in the National’s new home on the South Bank in 1976.

Back on Broadway, she hit another great milestone in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (1979), playing the gleefully cannibalistic, pie-making Nellie Lovett (and winning a fourth Tony) opposite Len Cariou’s demon barber in a dark and scintillating production by Hal Prince that played on Broadway for a year before touring the US for another 11 months.

Before Murder, She Wrote, a series of starry film roles included John Guillermin’s Death on the Nile (1978) with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow and Maggie Smith; Guy Hamilton’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980), in which she did some sleuthing stretches by playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, with Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis and, in his penultimate movie, Rock Hudson; Wilford Leach’s rocked-up The Pirates of Penzance (1983), opposite Kevin Kline as the Pirate King; and Neil Jordan’s wonderfully weird The Company of Wolves (1984), in which she played yet another eccentric old granny figure.

She did voices for two animated movies – Beauty and the Beast (1991, for Disney) and Anastasia (1997, for 20th Century Fox) – but was not in a feature movie again until she played Great Aunt Adelaide in Kirk Jones’s Nanny McPhee (2005), starring and written by Emma Thompson. Subsequently, she was with Jim Carrey in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011).

For many years, Lansbury kept a home in County Cork, Ireland, where she and Shaw would spend two months each year while maintaining their base in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She rented an apartment in New York in 2007 to return to Broadway in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a specially crafted two-hander for her and Marian Seldes about former tennis partners reliving past glories while watching a match at Flushing Meadow, and switching their heads from side to side during the rallies.

The play was not a huge hit, but Lansbury was electrifying and was greatly moved by the affection with which audiences greeted her. She had not been on Broadway since a possibly ill-advised 1983 revival of Mame.

Regarded by now as a national treasure, in 2009 she won her fifth Tony as Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, wearing a bright red wig and “with a superfluity of bad jewellery, the gait of a gazelle and a repertory of poses that bring to mind Egyptian hieroglyphs”, wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times.

At the end of the same year in New York, she appeared for six months as Madame Armfeldt in Trevor Nunn’s Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Sondheim and Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, winning plaudits for her nostalgic litany of fading qualities in Liaisons: “Where is style? Where is skill? Where is forethought? Where’s discretion of the heart? Where’s passion in the art? Where’s craft?”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences compensated for her lack of an Oscar with an award for “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” in 2013, and the following year she was made a dame, and took Madame Arcati to the Gielgud theatre in London. She was Aunt March in the BBC’s adaptation of Little Women (2017), and in 2018 she both appeared as a balloon-seller in Mary Poppins Returns, and joined up with another member of that cast, Dick Van Dyke, as guardian angels in the Christmas tale Buttons.

Shaw predeceased her in 2003, and she is survived by Anthony, David, her daughter, Deirdre, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and her brother Edgar.

🔔 Angela Brigid Lansbury, actor, born 16 October 1925; died 11 October 2022

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[biggsodorcitystories]

IVOR THE ENGINE!

It's my Mum's birthday today!

So, I was inspired to draw her favourite sentient engine, who is not an Awdry character, actually aired on UK television in 1959 - a full 25 years before Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends debut in 1984.

Meet Ivor the engine - a 0-4-0 tank engine - who works for The Merioneth and Llantisilly Railway Traction Company Limited, in the "top left-hand corner of Wales" with his driver, Jones the Steam.

While he never enjoyed the mass media success of his younger Sudrian counterpart, Ivor still has his small but devoted fanbase in the UK and deserves a little more love outside of it.

Unlike the Sudrian engines, Ivor:

Can swim, and has actually done so at the beach

Sings in a human choir

Enjoys making tea from his boiler

Has a dragon friend, Idris

So, I drew a humanised Ivor in the style of the humans in his show, along with Idris the Dragon.

Ivor the Engine and Idris are the creative property of Smallfilms and Oliver Postgate